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Support for Ontario’s injured workers is stronger than ever

Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board says it is providing stronger support for injured workers than ever before, while ensuring long-term sustainability.

Erecting scaffolding at Ontario Place in Toronto: workplace safety must be a high priority. (Chris So / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Kate Lamb

Fri., July 4, 2014

We were disappointed to read Odoardo Di Santo’s commentary on the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in the Star (“Workers’ compensation under attack” – June 28). As the WSIB’s Chief of Corporate Services, I seek to correct the record.

Mr. Di Santo suggests that the WSIB is cutting benefits to injured workers. On the contrary, only the government can enact legislation to change benefits – as in 1994, during Mr. Di Santo’s time as chair of the board, when the government introduced the Friedland formula, which ended full indexation, reducing benefits for injured workers.

The WSIB is committed to providing fair compensation to injured workers, while ensuring the long-term sustainability of the system. Today, the WSIB is doing better on every measure of success than we were in the early 1990s.

In the early 1990s, the WSIB’s funding status was down to 37 per cent, posing the very real threat that the system would not be able to meet its obligations to injured workers. In 2009, when the Auditor General released his report, it was 54 per cent and the Auditor General declared that failing to control the unfunded liability could affect the WSIB’s ability to meet future commitments to provide worker benefits.

Today, the compensation system is over 64-per-cent funded, and we are well on our way to meeting the government’s requirement for full funding by 2027.

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Mr. Di Santo suggests that we should focus on the prevention of workplace injuries and the re-employment of injured workers. We agree, and have put in place a balanced plan with a focus on improved health care, return to work and recovery outcomes. Since 2009 there has been nearly a 20-per-cent reduction in workplace injuries in Ontario. And, despite suggestions otherwise, the number of claims allowed by the WSIB each year has remained steady at approximately 80 per cent for more than a decade.

Injured workers now have access to faster and more accessible health care specific to occupational injuries. Today injured workers get more timely and expert medical care then they have in over a decade. In 2010, we started hiring more than 300 return-to-work staff, who last year alone made more than 26,000 visits to workplaces to help injured workers get their jobs back.

As a result, since 2009 the number of workers still off work one year following their injury has dropped in half. These are all positive results for both workers and the economy of Ontario.

All these improvements have been undertaken to ensure the sustainability of the system for generations to come. We routinely survey workers and employers through an independent third party, and currently have greater satisfaction levels with our services than ever before.

The WSIB’s financial improvements since 2009 have come from three sources: First, due to payroll growth and premium increases imposed by WSIB, employers are paying over $1 billion more in revenue per year despite the fact that injuries have dropped by 20 per cent. Second, thanks to strong prevention activities, fewer injuries, more timely medical care and workers returning to work faster, the cost of benefits has come down by over $600 million per year. And finally, better management has seen the investment portfolio grow from $14 billion in 2009 to over $22 billion today. These are the factors that have resulted in reductions to the unfunded liability and a more sustainable system for the future.

At any given time, there are more than 250,000 injured workers receiving our benefits and services, totalling over $2.5 billion annually. That’s the equivalent of the population of Windsor – and a responsibility we take very seriously.

Finally, Mr. Di Santo suggests the WSIB is “illegally implementing” policies around pre-existing conditions. However, pre-existing conditions are a fact of life, and WSIB has been making decisions about how to treat these conditions for many years. The WSIB has been engaging stakeholders for more than two years on the development of new policies to provide clarity to this issue.

Ontario remains the only jurisdiction in Canada without a policy on pre-existing conditions. Our goal is to ensure claims for work-related injuries and illnesses will not be denied where a pre-existing condition exists.

We at the WSIB are proud to serve the needs of Ontario’s injured workers and employers, and we are dedicated to ensuring the system is here for Ontarians for generations to come.

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